This doctoral dissertation research project conducted by Chelsea Chapman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison investigated cultures of energy in central Alaska by asking how regional energy resources are conceptualized, experienced, debated and developed. The co-project investigator conducted semi-structured interviews with regional fossil energy industry workers, state energy planners and regulators, environmental organizers, and renewable (wind and biomass) energy developers. Life history narratives were collected from several individuals with extensive experience with Alaska’s energy industries. Participant observation was undertaken within the regional environmental community and at a natural gas development consultancy firm, documenting the informal, everyday creation and use of energy knowledge. The co-P.I. collected additional ethnographic data at regional energy planning meetings, conferences on renewable and fossil energy, and archival research of public comment hearings on energy development and land use in interior Alaska. Analysis of the ethnographic data produced a series of individual and institutional conceptual models of energy. These models were then related to social variables including ethnicity, religion, and residence in order to understand how such factors influence evaluations of energy in local conflicts over resource development.

The project finds, first, that although multiple cultural orientations toward nature, land, and power circulate within Alaskan energy production, a majority of participants in the study share a conception of energy as innate, invisible power. Cultural models of energy confirm its perceived relationship to such personal, regional and societal characteristics as vitality, independence, stamina, and life force. Most interviewees identified interior Alaska and the North more broadly as diverse and energy-rich spaces in terms of resources but precarious (energy-brittle) due to legacies of political relationships established by North Slope oil production, historical social inequality, and the ecological and infrastructural impacts of global climate change. Second, the project finds that religious or spiritual affiliation is a better indicator of a participant’s conceptualization and evaluation of energy than are other social variables considered in the study. Religious affiliation with neo-Pentecostal Christianity frequently correlates with assertions of a moral imperative to free both renewable and hydrocarbon energy resources thought to be languishing untapped in Alaskan lands. Others participants, especially Alaska Native people who identified their spiritual practice as traditional and based on subsistence land use, conceptualize ‘energy’ as a force coming from ongoing social relationships between land, people, and animals. Energy resources, including coal, oil, natural gas and biomass fuels, are conceptualized as components of an interrelated utilitarian and spiritual landscape.

The study contributes to an emerging anthropology of energy by providing ethnographic data on conceptions of energy and their role in animating social and environmental conflicts about resource development. It provides accounts of the social relations between the public, private, and nongovernmental organizations that produce and manage energy, documents the histories of individuals and places that have been significantly transformed by regional energy production, and brings to light the often-unequal interaction of fields of knowledge about energy during processes of developing new fuel sources. In this study, attention to the micro-social interaction of multiple cultural, religious and conceptual orientations within local networks of energy knowledge holders suggests a compelling direction for future research at the intersection of social studies of environment and of reli...

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