Power Struggles

"Power Struggles is a thoughtful and exciting book."

~American Ethnologist

"Power Struggles, Jaume Franquesa's detailed historiography of energy generation in southern Catalonia, offers valuable insight into why people might protest against wind turbines."

~American Anthropologits

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Before they can become energy water, wind, and splitting atoms must land somewhere–in a turbine, on a grid, in a pipe–always in places marked by prior histories of struggle over landscapes, livelihoods, and identities. This lucid and absolutely engaging book takes us into the heart of the encounter between would-be abstract power, and the embodied social forces that shape, channel, and challenge it. Theorization, argument, history, geography, and everyday life at 'the end of the world' are tightly woven: outstanding.

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~Tania Murray Li, author of Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier

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Franquesa's historical anthropology of energy in southern Catalonia is both engagingly written and thought-provoking. He convincingly demonstrates that the social sciences have been wrong in relegating energy to a 'natural' domain that is imagined to be external to their field of interest. The seemingly innocent harnessing of natural forces is always a matter of displacing environmental burdens onto marginalized social groups.

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~Alf Hornborg, author of Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street

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This is a compelling book, not just because of Franquesa's mastery of vivid ethnographic writing, but because of the lucid and sophisticated way he weaves together theories of value and unequal exchange to cast a whole new light on capital's encounters with rural spaces.

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~Jane L. Collins, author of The Politics of Value

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Indispensable reading for energy justice in an age of climate crisis.

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~Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life

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This is anthropological political economy at its best. A deep historical and ethnographic understanding of Catalan peasants and their struggles interlaced with invaluable discussions about key issues such as dignity, autonomy, land, energy, peripheripherality, and the contradictions of non-synchronicity and struggle. Franquesa offers us deep insights into the ongoing enigma of Catalan and Spanish politics.

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~Don Kalb, author of Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands 1850–1950