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Contribution short abstract

Anthropology resists simple answers and struggles for a public voice within neoliberal and neo-fascist systems. Ethnography from family-run firms shows how energy futures are negotiated through forms of care and commitment, opening spaces for re-politicising energy and practicing situated dissent.

Contribution long abstract

The first answer I would instinctively give is that anthropology cannot truly have a public voice as long as we remain fully inside neoliberal or neo-fascist systems. Anthropology is a discipline that resists simple, reassuring answers. It insists on complexity and contradiction. For this reason, the only way anthropology can meaningfully influence political decisions—as a science of complexity—is if the political system, and the dominant worldview more broadly, are willing to change. Otherwise, the space left to anthropological intervention remains marginal, confined to forms of partial and fragile resistance. In a more pessimistic register, one might even say that it often takes a profound systemic failure before alternative ways of seeing and organising the world can become visible.

That said, ethnography also allows us to identify cracks within dominant systems. Drawing on my research in family-run manufacturing firms in Northern Italy, I observe that decisions about a more sustainable future are not reduced to compliance with indicators, audits, and optimisation logics requested by bureaucratic commitments. Calculations often intersect with affective commitments, relationships, and the long-term survival of the firm. All this generate situated ways of engaging with sustainability that resist both techno-solutionism and narratives of inevitable collapse.

These practices show how sustainable futures are already negotiated without grand narratives. Anthropology can re-politicise energy discourse by bringing into public debates how different futures are being lived and imagined within the present, and by asking whether it, too, must experiment with more situated forms of dissent within their institutions.