[Publication] "To Transact and Shimmer: Energy in the Expanded Field", Annual Review of Anthropology 54 - Gretchen Bakke
Abstract
“To Transact and Shimmer: Energy in the Expanded Field” makes the argument that in anthropology, the potential for energetic relations to alter worlds was of disciplinary importance well before the current interest in energy production as technoscientific endeavor. More specifically, an expanded history of the subdiscipline shows how contemporary understandings of energy as an extractable and (unevenly) deployed resource link to a more immaterial, indeed magical, theorizing of influence and power. Energy thus conceptualized stands in excess of thermodynamics, and it continues to provide anthropologists with a fruitful means of moving between things, scales, materials, communities, ideas, and even disciplines.