Solar rooftop in Kalahandi, India

Rooftops occupy a special place in representational strategies of the solar industry. In western middle class neighborhoods, slate-gray roofs clad with blueish grid-like solar panels visually double up as futuristic billboards, signaling aspirational yet responsible consumption in an age of declining energy reserves.
This image, however, is of a rooftop in Kalahandi: a poor, often famine-stricken, predominantly rural district in India. The image frames a traditional home built with mud walls and wooden pillars. The the two small panels in view (acquired through a government distribution scheme) do not clad the roof so much as casually share space with baskets full of red chillies, loose herbs, a crumpled white shirt, an iron vessel, two steel plates holding seeds, and, at the far end, a fish covered by a net.
Several theorists have recently underscored the need to engage with energy as an analytic through which to understand social systems (Szeman 2014, Urry 2014), with concepts like “energopolitics” urging attention to the role of energy in the constitution of social and political worlds (Boyer 2011). The assemblage of motley objects on the rooftop enables at least two “energopolitical” readings of the energies being represented here.
First, is the de-centering of the technological in what constitutes our imaginaries of solar energy. The image both literally and figuratively de-centers panels: they do not occupy pride of place on the roof (as is often the case with solar rooftops in western contexts), nor do they appear particularly futuristic or exceptional sitting amidst chillies, herbs, fish, seeds, and clothes set out to dry. They become just one of several mundane, everyday household objects that have been placed on the roof for the explicit purpose of harnessing solar energy. This visual flattening of epistemological hierarchies between technological and non-technological methods of ‘harnessing the sun’ opens up questions about the regimes of power that dictate our dominant technological imaginary of solar energy to begin with.
Second, the image provides us with the resources to queer the rhetorical binaries between technological concerns of “energy efficiency” (which are commonly mapped onto urban and western contexts), and ethical narratives of “energy access” (mapped on to spaces marked as rural and poor). While government and NGO pamphlets often mobilize images of panels on impoverished thatched roofs to advertise their role in enhancing energy access, such images rarely if ever include depictions of the extremely popular, non-technological forms of solar energy use seen here. In featuring these commonly-erased practices, the image gives us opportunity to rethink “efficiency”, locating it in the rural rather than the urban. This is because such practices are in fact the most technically efficient forms of solar energy use, producing neither waste nor carbon in their wake.
The rooftop therefore speaks back to the assumptions enfolded within western codes of responsible, sustainable energy consumption the household level. In mobilizing multiple registers of solar energy simultaneously, it serves to broaden our perspectives on what zero-carbon, sustainable energy consumption looks like.

References:
Szeman, Imre. “Conclusion: On Energopolitics.” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2014): 453-64.
Urry, John. “The Problem of Energy.” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 5 (2014):3-20.
Boyer, Dominic. “Energopolitics and the Anthropology of Energy.” Anthropology News 52, no. 5 (2011):5-7.

Commentary on Rachel Tanur's Works: Chinese Man Pulling Cart

This photograph poetically encapsulates a series of contrasts that more or less map on to each other: tradition versus modernity, poverty versus wealth, slowness versus speed, and even man versus machine. In my reading, I will focus on the regimes of energy use and access that underlie these contrasts in the image, and by doing so, consider the socialities that result from the availability of cheap fossil fuels in our contemporary lives. At the center of the frame we see a man dressed in a blue jacket pulling miscellaneous items on a cart. He is captured mid-step, as he walks he passes a motorcycle parked to his right. The contrast between these two technologies of mobility produces meaning in this image. Even to those of us unfamiliar with the specificities of the cultural context, the man, who appears to be wearing traditional clothes, is marked as poor because of the contrast between his mode of transport and the motorbike. While rickshaws (carts with human beings as passengers) are culturally coded as a symbol of feudalism in China, and were banned by Mao during the revolution, carts with goods on them did not have the same negative charge. It is in this context that it is important to note that while the cart appears to be heavily laden with objects, the image does not pathologize the man’s poverty. He does not appear to be struggling with the weight – his shoulders and back are straight, his clothes are not too shabby, and his facial expression does not betray exhaustion or weariness as he walks straight ahead, squinting slightly in the sunlight. Despite this, our first instinct is to sympathize with him: he is seen to be performing a kind of labor that makes us morally uncomfortable in a world where certain kinds of non-artistic human labor are marked as drudgery if they could be performed more quickly and efficiently by machines. Building on the insight of cultural theorists Salminen and Vadén (2015) who exhort us to consider what fossil fuels make possible to think, we can say that it is the cheap and easy availability of fossil fuels that produces the context in which such morality is produced and makes logical sense. It is the presence and availability of fossil fueled mobility in this picture that makes the condition of cart-pulling seem morally problematic. However, to point to the structures of morality that are informed by our easy access to fossil fuels is not to make the argument that such morality is misplaced. Rather, it is to be aware of how fossil-fueled energy systems have played a role in the social construction of what are morally desirable forms of human labour. The image therefore opens up questions of whether our contemporary moralities normalize patterns of excess consumption of energy; or at the very least allows us to think of how our codes for what is morally acceptable might get restructured as we move towards lower carbon modernities.