Analyze

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

• Outside of this group, I believe my work will/is performing a similar type of work to Boyer's, detailing all of the factors, the multiplicity of forces, both historical and contemporaty, that enable, preclude, and characterize energy transition in a specific locale. However, I will dedicate more effort to developing that middle ground between conceptual minima and ethnographic maxima, primarily through the scales and systems. I hope to use the scales and system huristic to provide a clearer analysis of how these specific “multiplicity of forces” become entangled in different ways. I intend to tease out how these entanglements engender processes and phenomena that can be abstracted to generate such concepts as energopower and the like.

• Renewable energy transition, if it recreates the same extractive, centralized, domineering, energopolitical regimes as the fossil fuel industry, has the potential to be just as damaging to the planet and to human beings as fossil fuels.
• Abstract power concepts like energopower, biopolitics, capital do not do justice to the particularities of specific locales. Ethnography is needed to be better attuned to the historical and contemporary relations of power that characterize politics in the Anthropocene.

• "If we wish to imagine and discuss aeolian futures in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world—what is needed are more and better ethnographies of the multiplicity of forces (historical and contemporary, material and anthropolitical) that are generating, inflecting, and obstructing potential futures" (193).

• The separation of theory and ethnography in this text is… stark. There were literally only a few lines here and there that tied the ethnographic material back to the discussion in the introduction. I understand this to be an intervention in Anthropology that privileges ethnography over social theory. And I appreciate that. But perhaps there is a meso level between conceptual minima and ethnographic maxima? A level that identifies “the multiplicity of forces” that characterize the political terroir and that attempts to discern the entanglement of these forces in a way that clearly specifies the limits of the concept.  

The text builds on the concepts "biopower" and "capital" and introduces the concept "energopolitics" to exisiting anthropolitical minima. In the text's introduction, Boyer disucsses the limitations of these concepts when universalized, because they are multiplicities that have been bundled into more nominal forms as part of analytic projects, and then expands on these concepts in order to situate them within anthropolitical and technopolitical domains in Mexico. For example, biopower, which can be defined as a practice of governance that denotes vast networks of enablement with many infrastructures and actors in order to optimize human life, and in Mexico the government put forth discourse around renewable energy development that discusses it as a means of guaranteeing or imporiving the health and welfare of human enviornments, economies, communities, and individuals. 

I will consider the impacts of retrofitting, rennovations, and weatherization in new terms now. A "just" transition will be at the forefront of my mind when considering the impacts of green energy in Philadelphia. Gentrification is already a massive issue in Philadelphia, and I had considered how green energy may play into it, but now I have models, like the Yansa model, which offer ways for a green transition to benefit the community at large. On top of this, I can now relate capital and biopower into this transition better, with detailed examples as seen in the book.

I good example of biopower in the book is how the extractive nature that is a requirement for oil and fossil fuel bussiness has translated into wind, despite not being a requirement. In Philadelphia, we have seen something similar with solarize Philadelphia. I do not have the exact details right now, but I remember a plan for a community based building for solar panels running into issues. I would like to reanalyze that and compare it to wind farms in Mexico.