What happens when a project with the purported potential to change the landscape of power in the Southwest – indeed to change history – comes into being? In the desert badlands of northern New Mexico, where Diné families living on the Navajo Nation haul their water, burn wood and coal in their homes, live in the economic shadow of border towns like Farmington and two existing coal plants, and yet are unconnected to the transmission lines that tower above and carry energy off the reservation to regional cities, a proposal for a new coal-fired power plant poses fantasies of both, to call upon Tsing’s pairing again, “hope and despair.”
This is a study of the cultural political effects surrounding this project, making Desert Rock a fulcrum for understanding the broader dynamics of energy politics on the Navajo Nation. Since Desert Rock has not (yet) been constructed, this is an ethnographic approach to an emergent phenomenon. That which is not yet, but might be, is haunted by ghosts of possibility – alternate futures that vie for traction amidst a range of potential outcomes. Such a sense of possibility begets hope and terror, the sacred and the profane. In the midst of the debate over who benefits and who suffers from such a project, of whether such a project is “good” or “bad” for the Nation and the greater region, another question hovers: What is significant about Desert Rock, even if the power plant is never built? What if it remains a specter, profoundly shaping the present and the future, yet is omitted from history because of its failure to materialize?26
26 This would be in the vein of what Peter Redfield calls “shadow histories,” or “accounts of the very real
(1) Possibilities
Tracing the contours and effects of something not yet materialized yet made real through practice and discourse, the dissertation illustrates how the very possibility of future changes in the built environment has embodied effects and cultural political
consequences for people in the present. As an ethnography of energy, this is a story about how futures are being forged in the present – technically, culturally, politically,
subjectively, and ethically – through specific, proposed technologies. While others have brought ethnography to bear on practices of future-making as a site of socio-cultural contestation, my intent is to bring the materiality of future-making to the fore by tracing how a specific, proposed energy technology mediates and produces these debates. Driving these contestations are hopes for futures that are different than, and better than, the present – such is the work of a diverse range of social movements considered in this project. This “politics of possibility,” to borrow the lexicon of feminist geographers JK Gibson-Graham, works in “the here and now,” to craft and cultivate different ways of being, knowing, and doing. They elaborate:
“Cultivating ourselves as thinking subjects within a politics of (economic) possibility has involved us with techniques of ontological reframing (to produce the ground of possibility), rereading (to uncover or excavate the possible), and creativity (to generate actual possibilities where none formerly existed)” (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxix-xxx).
Gibson-Graham’s project is to advance what they call a “politics of possibility” – a new social theory of power, an approach that is Foucaultian and phenomenological in its foundations, but also draws heavily on queer theory and social movements studies. Their methodology includes discursive analysis, media analysis, phenomenological,
archival/historical, and action research focus groups. It is also actively reflexive, in the sense that part of their aim is to transform their own practices and mode of engagement as researchers, “to cultivate ourselves as theorists of possibility” (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxviii).
I draw upon Gibson-Graham’s identified techniques of enacting a politics of possibility to inform a framework of emergence, in that what is being worked out is not considered to be finished, fixed, or settled; on the contrary, the very techniques of future- making (enacting the possible) are experimental and processual, anchored in visions of how one imagines the world out there to be and then goes about building that world, brick by brick. My emphasis on the material culture of these processes – the artifacts of the built environment such as coal fired power plants, wind turbines, or solar panels – draws attention to the ways in which such a politics of possibility is brought into being not only through the work done on subjects and places (as Gibson-Graham stress), but through the material world itself. One goal of this dissertation is to contribute an
emphasis on materiality to discussions of political possibilities and the way such politics are enacted through contentious, emergent phenomena.
(2) Developments, Movements
In most analyses of development controversies, scholars in anthropology, critical development studies, political ecology and indigenous studies have responded to the effects and consequences of development projects, once they are constructed. Or, development projects demand attention only when they collapse, fail, or break down, given the “invisibility” of infrastructure until it breaks down (Bowker and Star 1999). We need only recall the levees of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or the nuclear
explosion at Chernobyl. In general, there is a tendency to study projects that have “made history.” However, less work has been done to consider the effects and consequences of development projects that never materialize or become institutionalized as artifacts in the built environment – projects that remain in history’s “shadows” (Redfield 2000).
Recent critical ethnographies of global technological development events (several of which also pertain to energy production) include: chemical plant explosions and nuclear reactor catastrophes, generating new conceptions of life and politics (Fortun 2001; Petryna 2002); oil exploration revealing internal frictions in indigenous communities (Sawyer 2004); international monetary and other health-oriented aid programs (Mosse 2005); space exploration technologies built in colonial locales (Redfield 2000); and the economic, gendered, and livelihood effects of a dam (Araujo 2009), just to list a few. These important works, among others, evaluate transformations effected by the actual implementation – and failures – of specific technologies and infrastructure. Yet, in some development technologies – like the one presented in this dissertation – the object itself is never, or not yet built, and still is powerful enough to mobilize action, knowledge, identities, and politics, even without the first brick being laid. In this sense, my concern is with the materiality of the immaterial.
I find the framework of emergence particularly suitable for understanding energy development projects and their attending activism, as practiced through diverse social and environmental justice movements as well as through modes of social action that
challenge conventional boundaries of what counts as “a movement.” My interest in social movements emerges from my personal history and the drama of engagement that brought me to this project but also from recent turns in anthropologies of social movements that
rethink both the ontology and epistemology of “a movement” beyond the theories that have dominated the field of social movements studies.27 For example, as David J. Hess suggests, “social movements” might be more productively conceptualized as “alternative pathways,” allowing us to broaden our conceptualization of “movements” and “make it possible to avoid drawing premature boundaries when confronted with the fluidity of goals and repertoires of action” (Hess 2007, 4). Hess’ work, as it addresses emerging technologies and energy technologies, in particular, is instructive for thinking at the intersections of established disciplinary fields and re-thinking “movements” conceptually in a vein similar to the working group I have been a part of at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Similarly, this ontological shift moves us away from imagining movements in terms of “structural forces” or “strategizing,” the dualistic structure-agency approach (of “political opportunities” and so forth) that has dominated the field. Rather, in Arturo Escobar’s words, seeing movements’ “self-organizing” nature permits an open-ended view of movements as both “dependent and independent of context and environment … in which the emergent patterned movement is best explained as the result of interaction between on-the-ground recurrent activity and surrounding conditions” (Arturo Escobar 2008a,
27 Elsewhere, with my colleagues and co-authors Maribel Casas-Cortés and Michal Osterweil, I discuss the
dominant field of social movements studies (SMS) as it has been developed in sociology and political science, primarily, arguing that anthropological and ethnographic approaches to SMS has done much to disrupt and open up the category of “movement” (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil, and Powell 2008). This work builds upon seven years of co-labor with others in the Social Movements Working Group at UNC-Chapel Hill, including Arturo Escobar, Dorothy Holland, Charles Price, Don Nonini, Charles Kurzman, John Pickles, Wendy Wolford, Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Vinci Daro, Gretchen Fox, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Sebastian Cobarubias, Kim Allen, Mario Blaser, Elena Yehia, Carie Little Hersh, Sara Safransky, Alice Brooke Wilson, Georgina Drew, Joe Wiltberger, Liz Mason-Deese, and others, in which we have critically engaged the very concept of “movement” in our diverse modes of research on/with/through social
260). In effect, seeing movements not as fixed entities but as complex processes of emergence informs my overall approach.
And yet, this project is not “about” a social movement. Re-thinking “movement” is relevant to my work on energy development on the Navajo Nation because there are multiple forms of social action generated through energy development technologies, some of which self-identify as “a movement,” while others do not. Moreover, though I came to this project out of my work with a movement, this dissertation is not a project “on” that political formation in any strict sense. Rather, this is a project “with” a movement or, said differently, to create a conversation between conversations28, with movement actors and others, drawing upon the situated perspective of my position of (epistemic, cultural, historical) difference. In this project, the movement (or “alternative pathway” of which it is a part) itself informs my analysis through its own knowledge work and action, but is not the object of inquiry. My interlocution and location inserts me into it, rather than the other way around.
In addition to these theoretical edges of social movements studies, my ethnographic approach to the emergent draws upon a mosaic of literatures in which “emergence” is understood ontologically and relationally, traceable through practice. In particular, I find works in STS, cultural studies, and contemporary biology helpful for assembling this conceptual pattern and informing an anthropological approach. Because emergence is a “process of coming into being” (Oxford English Dictionary), it is evident and traceable through its relations and its practices. As such, I situate my analytic
approach to emergence within practice theory, more broadly, in which emergence maintains an appreciation of the fluidity of action and relations producing social life.
(3) Science, Technology, and Society
Studies of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) is a broad, interdisciplinary field, increasingly incorporating anthropological perspectives and ethnographic
methodologies into studies of science, technology, expertise, and related concerns (Downey and Dumit 1997). As sub-threads within STS, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Material Culture Studies unmoor the centrality of the human in anthropology, broadening the ecology of things under ethnographic consideration. Both make the emergent their concern, emphasizing how complex objects and things help bring the world(s) into being. As Fred Myers writes of material culture studies:
“These theoretical orientations, deriving from a range of interventions and instrumentalities in human life, have called attention to emergent realities – from websites to automobiles, from videocassettes to clothing, from the implications of new reproductive technologies to the patenting of human genes – that demand rethinking of approaches to human life” (Myers 2004, 15).
Deploying emergence as a way of rethinking human (and non-human) life is taking place where STS meets anthropology in at least three places:
First, Michael Fischer’s emphasis on “technoscientific infrastructures and emergent forms of life” (2005) points out three elements in the notion of emergence: organization; ethics/politics/action; and the literal creation of new forms of life, such as certain molecules (suggestive of Latour’s history of the microbe in France). The first is a
question of form – some objects or events come into being which are irreducible to their constitutive components and take on aspects of “larger cyborgian, actor-networks and material-semiotic modes of production” (Fischer 2005, 56). The second, he asserts, is a matter of ethical and political action – in which “acts have serious consequences, leading to new social forms” (ibid). Such thinking in terms of emergence helps ethnographers makes sense of these new “ethical plateaus,” defined as “spaces in which multiple technologies interact; where ethics and politics cannot be reduced to two-person, zero- sum games; and where often incommensurable frames of reference come into play, involving irrational passions and fundamental commitments, as well as rational calculations” (ibid). Such “ethical plateaus,” as we will see, have been produced repeatedly and at various critical junctures in the ongoing debates over energy
development on the Navajo Nation. In fact, one might go so far as to extend his spatial metaphor to say: the Navajo Nation is an ethical plateau for broader, national and global debates over energy production and consumption. The methodological stakes of Fischer’s argument are that such plateaus and forms require new forms of ethnography.
Second, in their Introduction to the recent volume, Cultural Anthropology, editors Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun identify Emergence as one of four key themes in
anthropological work today, the others being “Moorings,” “Modernities,” and “Engagements.” Noting the influence of complexity theory and its discussions of “hurricanes, organisms, cities, flocking birds, economies, and ant colonies [being] conceived as ‘emergent,’” (Fortun and Fortun 2009, xxvii). The editors also rely heavily upon Michel Foucault’s understanding of emergence,
‘molded by a great many distinct regimes,’ forcefully interacting. ‘Entstehung
designates emergence, the moment of arising,’ Foucault writes: ‘…Emergence is always produced through a particular stage of forces. The analysis of the
Entstehung must delineate this interaction, the struggle these forces weight against each other or against adverse circumstances” (Fortun and Fortun 2009, xxviii).
The editors present recent anthropological approaches to emergence as diverse, dynamic and “productively different,” though coherent in their attention to processes of becoming (Fortun and Fortun 2009, xxvii). Subdividing categories of Emergence in cultural anthropology as “Re-Conceiving Wholes,” “Figuring Historical Difference,” “Mediations” and “Modes of Care,” the editors assemble essays that attend to globally dispersed, culturally and historically distinct patterns of emergence, The editors argue that attending to emergence within anthropology is a technique for working across questions of time, scale, and political/ethical crisis in current ethnographic endeavors.
Third, in Actor Network Theory (ANT), an offshoot of STS, reality is formed only through emergent practices, that is, through the associations formed and stabilized between entities. Not only does ANT advance a re-vamped concept of “the social” based on processes, working against prevailing sociological theories of the social as a
predetermined, naturalized “context” or background, the theory (and methodology, of ANT) emphasis the work that actors do to bring certain objects, realities, and effects into being (Law 1992; Latour 2006; Latour 1999; Latour 1997). I read ANT as an ontology and methodology, specifically, as a practice theory of emergence, especially following its Latourian strand, further relevant to this project in its exposure of the “Modern
Constitution,” involving various acts of purification that suppress and deny the
despite our faith, otherwise (Latour 1991). Actor Network Theory informs authors who explore how circulating, disintegrated bodies, subjects, and practices become coordinated and situated through particular practices. However, I recognize (with others, especially many working in feminist theory) ANT’s serious limitations, particularly in being a largely presentist theory and offering no viable analysis of power. Still, using ANT encourages rethinking development, political ecology, identity/subjectivity, and methodology – key themes in this dissertation – in relational, networked terms, repositioning the researcher as one interlocutor among many in what I consider to be increasingly crowded fields of research and action.
Anna Tsing’s quotation opening this section draws our attention to the need for an emergent methodology when we recognize the unpredictable and often urgent nature of social and technological phenomena. And in sites where “hope and despair huddle together,” bound by the “same technologies” – as certainly has been the case with the energy development on the Navajo Nation – the passions of yet unsettled, utopic and dystopic visions of the future are best confronted with an eye toward a methodology and ontology of emergence. This summary of theories of emergence is meant as a mosaic of approaches, showing resonances and mutual orbits, rather than a conclusive or definitive list of all possible relevant approaches to emergence.
(4) Cultural Studies
Emergence has a genealogy in foundations of cultural and literary studies, which I read as an emphasis on relationality. Raymond Williams distinguishes between the “dominant,” the “residual” and the “emergent,” with the emergent being only visible in
relation to the dominant (Williams 1977). He argues it is often hard to tell what is truly emergent (truly alternative or oppositional to the dominant culture) versus those things that are just novel or some new phase of the dominant culture. Therefore, the emergent, in his formulation, can only be defined relationally. He goes on to argue that the
emergence of a new cultural formation – even a new class – is always likely to be uneven, complex, and incomplete, and emergence will always be met with efforts at incorporation, thereby limiting the emergence. In his assessment, incorporation often looks like acceptance, recognition, or even acceptance of the emergence, even as it works to take it over. As we will see in subsequent chapters and the energy interludes between chapters, Williams’ theory of emergence is particularly helpful in thinking about the slippery nature of “alternative” energy technologies, where the “alternative” stands in for “the emergent” (as a response to the “dominant” technologies of fossil fuels). Williams writes:
“The alternative, especially in areas that impinge on significant areas of the dominant, is often seen as oppositional and, by pressure, often converted into it. Yet even here there can be spheres of practice and meaning which, almost by definition from its own limited character, or in its profound deformation, the dominant culture is unable in any real terms to recognize. Elements of emergence may indeed be incorporated, but just as often the incorporated forms are merely facsimiles of the genuinely emergent cultural practice. Any significant
emergence, beyond or against a dominant mode, is very difficult under these conditions; in itself and in this repeated confusion with the facsimiles and novelties of the incorporated phase. Yet, in our own period as in others, the fact of emergent cultural practice is still undeniable, and together with the fact of