Eco-environmental Perspectives in Iberian Cultural Studies

—Moderated by Germán Labrador and Jaime Vindel

Over recent decades in cultural studies, analytical capacities have been expanded by incorporating an environmental gaze. The question around the material limits that exist in any context of cultural production — energy, resources, processes, environmental circumstances, food chains, bio-mechanical limits — represents a radical “grounding” to approach culture from critique, not idealism. Equally, it raises the question around forms of sociopolitical imagination based on multispecies interdependency and thus an understanding of the history of modernity is unearthed as a history of the voracious exploitation of ecosystems allowing the critique of capitalism to be related to environmental destruction.

The assimilation of this perspective in an Iberian context is still in its infancy. In recent years, work has been carried out on the environmental foundations of Francoist developmentalism and on contemporary cultural proposals related to the twenty-first century’s eco-social crises. Nevertheless, an overall perspective is still lacking to understand the long-term logics that organise the extractive management of bodies and territories in the peninsula, stretching from the appearance of Iberian empires to the present. In this first part of the encounter, moderated by Adrián Almazán and Germán Labrador, Iñaki Prádanos will contribute to the discussion by drawing on the findings of his recent book A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies (Tamesis Books, 2023).

—Moderated by Adrián Almazán

This session analyses, from a situated perspective, the problem of energy transition, drawing from Jaume Franquesa’s book Molinos y gigantes. La lucha por la dignidad, la soberanía energética y la transición ecológica (Turbines and Giants. The Struggle for Dignity, Energy Sovereignty and Ecological Transition, Errata naturae, 2023). Therefore, the focus will be on the conclusions of ethnographic research in a region in southern Tarragona, where nuclear plants and renewable infrastructures have been implemented from the period of the Transition to democracy to the present-day context of environmental emergency. These energy facilities have brought about social and cultural transformation in the area, threatening the survival of a popular moral economy based on smallholdings.

From this critical approach to the effects of energy transition (more relevant than it would appear in view of the continued reliance on fossil fuels) on this peripheral sphere in Catalonia, questions under discussion are: To what degree is it possible to establish lines of continuity in the narratives of energy extraction that link the boom of nuclear power plants with the current renewable energy bubble? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the positions that identify an expression of internal colonialism in the deployment of solar and wind energy? What can anthropology contribute to our energy studies and why is it necessary? To what extent can reflections around the moral economy of the rural environment in a region such as the one studied by Franquesa form a starting point to reflect upon the possible alternatives to the current “energy transition”?